Radiolab · WNYC Studios

Life in a Barrel

April 3, 2026·55 min·4 clips

Reinhard Herkloss finds a decade-old barrel teeming with life, defying expectations of ecological harmony.

Start with life, capital L. Molly frames this as Lulu and Latif's 2022 report on chaos, messiness, and the point where evolution barges in. Gould arrives at Harvard after earning his Ph.D. in 1967, then gets tugged toward a question that is grand, strange, and a little funny: can computers help the fossil record talk back? Tom Schaaf makes the call. A University of Chicago paleontologist has read Gould's work and thinks new powerful machines might be able to do something useful with very old evidence. The fossil record is the barrel. It holds what humans know about what came before us, the rough archive that helped Darwin start thinking about evolution. The questions get big quickly. Why are we here on this earth? What are we related to? Can data from long-dead marine life say anything clear, or does it all dissolve into noise? So they meet in winter. Around 1972, Schaaf, Gould, Dave Routt, and Dan Simberloff go to Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where a marine fossil record is waiting. The setup is almost too good. Three paleontologists, an ecologist, and a computer really do sound like the start of a bar joke. Then the shells arrive. The archive is packed with marine invertebrates, including mollusks, ammonites, trilobites, and other seafloor life. Their first appearances and disappearances are logged in a book. That is the hook. Each species becomes a timed mark in the record, maybe a pattern, maybe randomness, maybe kinship, maybe some stubborn tangle of all of it. The episode keeps the mood playful without sanding down the scale. The joke makes the leap from fossil bookkeeping to existence feel less locked away. One moment someone is asking whether this means shellfish. The next, the conversation is circling Darwin, deep time, and the machinery people build to explain life. No tidy answer shows up yet. The fun is watching smart people admit the mess, grab the record anyway, and see whether a computer can turn old shells into a better question.

As heard by us

Radiolab turns a 1972 fossil-record computing project into a curious, lively story about evolution, extinction, and scientific mess.

Radiolab's "Life in a Barrel" begins with evolution at its messiest: Stephen Jay Gould, early in his Harvard years, joins Tom Schopf, Dave Raup, and Dan Simberloff in asking whether computers can pull new answers from the fossil record.

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Why you'd press play

Why did life turn out this way? Three paleontologists, an ecologist, a computer, and the fossil record went looking for clues.

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